A Collage A Day In August

Daily Collage #30 - Her Majesty

For August, I set myself a creative challenge: create thirty-one collages in thirty-one days, with the intent to flex my creative muscles, share my work with the world, and build a new body of work.

Here are some of the things I learned over the course of the project:

• Showing up to the page (virtual or otherwise) every day, whether I want to or otherwise, is powerful. Necessity really is the mother. 
• There are images that I like to use again and again, like vintage photographs, stars, the moon, the sky, wings, flowers, leafs, trees, ravens and other birds, cats. Finding new ways to use them is wonderful.

Prints (and some other fun things) are available in my Society6 shop.

Here's my basic process, more or less, when creating a collage:

Here Be Monsters

Monsters and the edge of the map

My August collage a day project is going really well. There's something about committing to daily creative output that not only just plain feels good, but I can see that I'm rapidly building a new body of work, and that is exciting.

This is the latest. I may do nothing else for the next few days but put vintage Victorian illustrations together with various cephalopod bodies, it's so much fun! Here Be Monsters is available in my Society6 shop. All the collages are posted on my Tumblr.

One Crazy Summer

Boom, Boom Boom

Summer has been kind of crazy busy, and I haven't been doing much of the kind of work that I usually share here. I've been riding my bike a lot, getting into better shape - 300 miles in June, 340 miles in July! So now you know where I've been for the last couple of months.

I've been doing all kinds of things on the creative front, though. It's just that for some reason, I've felt like compartmentalizing things more.

I've got an Instagram page now, where I've been sharing my seasonal photos and watercolored photos:

I've entered a few design contests over on 99 Designs. Mostly book covers, which I'd like do more:

And over on my Tumblr blog, I'm doing a collage-a-day project for the month of August:

Anyway, keeping busy, trying to make progress in every part of my life that needs it and working to build my skills further. Hope you're all having a great summer!

Favorite Things: Earth & Sky Colors

These are my favorite colors: brown, green, blue, white, black, gray.

This year, one of my goals is to make it through The Artist's Way. For a long time now, I've been struggling with my creativity, trying to work my way through creative block and to find my own voice as an artist. As I go through the process, I decided it would be good to sit down and list what I really like - the things that move me personally, and that feel like me. I wrote a list and I'm going to be exploring it here for the next few weeks.

The list, titled "Stuff I like", started when I was looking at my Etsy favorites last week and I realized that almost everything on the first page of my "likes" was either brown, green, or blue - with lots of black, white and gray as well. I thought about it for a bit, thought of my wardrobe, my favorite pottery, looked at the bits of art on my walls and realized "oh yeah, these are my favorite colors."

I set out to create a treasury based purely on my favorite colors, without fretting about whether or not the treasury would be popular or make the front page or anything like that. I love the result. It's kind of this road map of the heart of things that I like.

As a wise acquaintance said, it's not enough to like stuff, you have have to understand why you like it. I love these colors because they are the colors of earth and sky. I love nature and her colors: soft greens like moss and agate, earth browns, water blues, sky blues, especially transition time skies - sunrise and sunset. Clouds. Stones.

They are restful, comfortable colors, and I never feel the need to "live up to them" - they are undemanding colors, not like reds, oranges and yellows. Although those do have their place, which I will explore more next time.